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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26681269">the forest begins with a tree</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/loyaulte_me_lie/pseuds/loyaulte_me_lie'>loyaulte_me_lie</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Backstory, Character Study, F/F, Fluff, Found Family, M/M, Sequel</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 03:08:40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>15,035</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26681269</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/loyaulte_me_lie/pseuds/loyaulte_me_lie</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes being immortal is about fighting. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s about stories and homes and justice and closure. There are, after all, many different ways to live forever.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>144</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>the forest begins with a tree</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Basically I had feelings. So many feelings. And then I listened to Queen and had even more feelings. And they're all apparently really chatty narrators, who knew, so...oops? Note for the beginning: this is movie canon, especially re: Andy's backstory. The title from Zakia El-Marmouke’s beautiful poem ‘I Sleep in My Inkwell and Wave to the Distant.’</p><p>30/09/2020: Um also I just re-watched the movie and some of my backstory is a bit different to the movie's but just roll with me. Oh well!</p><p>Trigger warnings: (non-explicit) violence, mentions of (but no depictions of) slavery, drowning, grief.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p></p><blockquote>
  <p><em>Who waits forever anyway? <strong>- </strong></em> <strong>Queen</strong></p>
</blockquote><p>
  <strong>*</strong>
</p><p><strong>i.</strong> <strong>Andy</strong></p><p>When Andy says she can’t remember how old she is, she is lying. Before she was a warrior, before she came back from the dead she was Andromache of Troy. Before <em>that, </em>she was Andromache of Thebe. It’s not much, the remembrance, but it’s there. It lurks in the dark, sinks teeth into the edges of her thoughts when she isn’t paying enough attention. After all, it’s very difficult to forget an origin story.</p><p>Andromache of Thebe was headstrong and too wild, had a city and a library of myths and tales, her place as sure as the ground beneath her feet. She was a princess. She had two parents and five older brothers that loved her. She doesn’t recall their names but whenever she smells myrtle she thinks of a mother so long dead not even bones are left.</p><p>She remembers more about being Andromache of Troy, though she’d erase it all given half the chance. She remembers the unconquerable walls rearing up around a jewel-box of a city, all sweet smells and chatter and beautiful, unexpected buildings – god-built, some city-folk used to say. She remembers the feel of her husband’s hand on hers, adjusting her sword grip, the disapproving eyes of his father. Hector didn’t care. He loved that she wanted to learn how to fight, used to call her his warrior princess. She’d been cautious at first, wary of this big man with his dark beard and thick eyebrows and fine, princely nose but he wore his royalty lightly and had such endless patience and <em>loved </em>her with every fibre of his being…</p><p>…and he’d been defeated by the undefeatable warrior, chased and stabbed and slung from the back of a chariot, driven round Troy’s walls until his broken face was unrecognisable with blood and dirt. And then the city had fallen. And then they’d thrown her infant son from those god-built walls, burned the jewel-box city, tried to take her as a slave. She’d fought then, refused to surrender the way the women around her did. A Greek soldier had driven his sword into her gut in a fit of fury and she’d folded around it, gasping, sure she was about to see the ashy grey shores of the Styx and then…</p><p>…she’d woken up in a burned out ruin and a bloodstained dress with no-one but the carrion crows and the skies to hear her screams.</p><p>That had been the beginning.</p><p>*</p><p>She makes her slow, painful way north along the coast – over crumbling cliffs and jagged mountains, retching, aching, unable to just <em>die. </em>Time blurs out. She doesn’t know how long it’s been when she’s picked up by an Amazon patrol, hauled none-too-gently onto a horse. Dispassionately, she remembers that they lost their queen the same way she lost her husband – to wretched Achilles and his insatiable sword. It’s odd sometimes how fate can echo.</p><p>There’s a warm bath and gentle hands, and she’s dressed in fine clothes and taken before the new queen, Hippolyta, who sits on a magnificent, jewel-studded throne. Andromache has never seen a woman rule in her own right before. It’s a dizzying sight.</p><p>“My soldiers say you are the Princess Andromache of Troy,” Hippolyta says.</p><p>Andromache laughs, as hollow and empty as a moonless night. “Not anymore.”</p><p>Hippolyta frowns, just a little, and then smooths out her expression. “Whatever you are, then,” she says, “we offer you sanctuary.”</p><p>The dismissal is clear in her voice, and Andromache lets herself be led away.</p><p>*</p><p>In retrospect, the Amazons are the best thing that could have happened to her. She buries her past in female companionship and fighting lessons – swords, bows, spears, on horseback, on foot. Her favourite is a beautiful double-bladed axe, curved, that catches the sunlight on its downward swing and dazzles it into her enemy’s eyes. She buys one for herself and joins the army, kisses the blade after her initiation ceremony and vows that no mother or wife will be made to feel like she was.</p><p>It’s a sentiment that doesn’t survive its first encounter with the enemy but by that point she figures she doesn’t care.</p><p>She comes back to life in inches. Laughs with her sisters-in-arms. Rises through the ranks until she’s standing at Queen Hippolyta’s side. Andromache the War-Bringer, they call her, Andromache the Invincible. At night, she dreams of others – at first just a man with deep brown skin and a snake-quick smile, and then a girl too, with starlight tangling in her loose, dark hair and an unbelievable aim with a bow. It’s only flickers, seconds, but they keep returning to pace her dreams, night after night. She wonders who they are. She wonders if they’re like her.</p><p>One day, men come from a city across the sea. Hippolyta’s beloved youngest sister is bathing by the ocean. It happens very, very quickly.</p><p>“I can’t commit to a war,” Hippolyta says. She’s pacing around her council chamber, her skirts swishing around her legs. Andromache stands very still and watches her. “We can’t. The army is still recovering from the last one.”</p><p>“Send someone,” another general says just as Andromache murmurs, “Steal her back.”</p><p>Hippolyta stops, right in front of Andromache. “Could you do it?”</p><p>“Probably,” Andromache says. “I won’t know until I see the place.”</p><p>“It would buy us some time even if it wasn’t successful,” Hippolyta’s other sister says, ironclad. Andromache has seen her walking the beach, weeping. “It would reassure Antiope that she’s not alone, that we’re coming for her.”</p><p>“Would you?” Hippolyta asks.</p><p>Andromache bows, low. “Yes, my queen.”</p><p>She sails to Athens across a glittering, fracturing sea with a fair wind in her sails and several women-at-arms to keep the ship in good order. It is a beautiful city, dominated by its acropolis, but so proud of its chained women, its slaves, their monster-slaying, death-defying king.</p><p>The palace is easy to get into.</p><p>“I love him,” Antiope says, dark eyes wide, dark hair loose over her shoulders. She’s beautiful in the dim lamplight, illuminated gold, a goddess caged.</p><p>“More than your sisters?” Andromache demands. “More than your freedom?”</p><p>“It’s my choice, Andromache.” Antiope juts her chin out. The family resemblance is striking. “And anyway, what are you going to do? Raze the city to the ground? Drag me back in chains?”</p><p>“Your sisters are mustering an army.”</p><p>“Let them come,” she says.</p><p>Andromache stares at her in silence for a second, and then turns, climbs back out of the window and down the side of the palace, hand over hand. She knows what it is to be in love. She can’t pretend she’d do anything different if she were young again, newly the beloved of a kind, noble man. Not that she thinks Theseus is anything of the sort, but it doesn’t matter what she thinks.</p><p>Hippolyta is beside herself. “You should have taken her!” she shouts. “My foolish, stupid sister – we’ll be a laughingstock, we’ll be besieged by men who want a captive Amazon wife! Does she not know what she’s done?”</p><p>“She’s in love,” Andromache says, as calmly as she can in the face of all this blazing fury. Hippolyta screams, draws a knife and throws it, hard<em>. </em>It embeds itself in Andromache’s gut and she looks down at it, at the blood welling between her fingers. She takes a deep breath and yanks it out, lets it clatter to the ground. Within seconds, the wound has begun to heal. When she looks up, Hippolyta has gone white and very still.</p><p>“What <em>are </em>you?” she whispers, hand at her mouth.</p><p>“Cursed,” Andromache snaps, and walks away.</p><p>*</p><p>The couple from her dreams catch up to her in the Indus Valley, in a city ringed by reservoirs that Andromache thinks should be counted amongst the wonders of the world. She’s drinking a small beer in the shade of a wall somewhere, laying low between jobs, when suddenly there’s an arrow in her throat and blood bubbling into her mouth. For fuck’s sake. She lists to one side, scrabbles to pull it out, breathing quick and panicked through the pain but there’s a cloth over her head and a hard blow to her skull and she blacks out.</p><p>She wakes to firelight and smoke and the rasp of water against a bank. Instantly she has a hand on her dagger, flings it across the fire at the dark-skinned man sitting there. He twitches to the side so it lands in his shoulder instead of in his heart.</p><p>“Ow.” He grimaces, a flash of white teeth.</p><p>“You deserve it,” the pale woman sitting beside him says tartly. There’s a patch of sunburn across her nose, and her dark hair is in a topknot. Then, to Andy: “I’m sorry. I argued against taking you out like that but Lykon had to have the last word.”</p><p>The man, Lykon, has worked the dagger out of his shoulder and cleaned it on a clump of grass, passes it back over and then offers Andromache what appears to be their communal plate. “We had to be sure.”</p><p>He doesn’t apologise. The girl rolls her eyes. “We’re undying too. I’m Quynh. This is Lykon. You’ve probably dreamed of us, yes?”</p><p>“I’m sorry it’s taken so long,” Lykon says. “I dreamed of you first, but you were so far away and then Quynh popped up before I got there.”</p><p>“You say that like it’s my fault,” Quynh complains.</p><p>“It is,” Lykon says and then yelps. Andromache surmises that Quynh must have pinched him.</p><p>“What’s your name?” Quynh asks. “Where are you from?”</p><p>“Andromache. Thebes. Troy.”</p><p>“Troy,” Lykon exhales. “That was a nasty business.”</p><p>“The gods willed it,” Andromache murmurs, looking down at the food. She doesn’t like to think of Troy, of her beginning, of everything she’s lost. She’s done so well at moving on.</p><p>“The gods will many things,” Lykon says, firm, “I choose not to believe that greed-fuelled destruction is one of them.”</p><p>Andromache looks up and he holds her gaze for a moment before folding to his feet. “I’m going to check on the boat,” he says, and melts away into the dark. The fire scribbles gold sparks against the blue-black night, then blows them out. Quynh shifts closer.</p><p>“So what do you do?” Andromache asks. “Why did you kidnap me?”</p><p>Quynh shrugs. “We’re warriors, wanderers. Like you. We choose our own battles and we bow to no-one.” She grins, sudden and startling, “We stand up for people who can’t.”</p><p>“And what if you get it wrong?”</p><p>“We get it wrong a lot,” Quynh says, “we’re still human, Andromache. Only the gods have perfect knowledge. But we do our best and hope it’s enough.” Then, “you don’t have to come with us, but we thought we’d offer.”</p><p>“Haven’t got anywhere else to go,” Andromache grunts, and looks away before she can catch herself on Quynh’s smile.</p><p>*</p><p>They’re in Meroe, a beautiful, pyramid-guarded city in the Kingdom of Kush. Lykon has gone to pray, so Quynh and Andromache are exploring the market, hand in hand. Quynh took her hand a few years back once, in the middle of nowhere, and hasn’t let go since. Andromache doesn’t really know why but likes the feeling of it, of fingers around fingers, of wrists touching, of being that close to another person’s pulse. She likes Quynh too, all the unexpected contradictions of her – vicious, cheerful, funny, intelligent. She thinks she could spend another thousand years with Quynh and never get bored. She thinks she could be with Quynh forever.</p><p>When they’re done, Quynh drags her down to the banks of the Nile to sit and eat and watch the traders’ barges make their way downriver towards Egypt.</p><p>“I found something for you,” Quynh says, suddenly, her mouth full of bread.</p><p>“Eh?” Andromache turns on their blanket to face her. Quynh sits up, rummages in their bag and pulls out a tiny silk pouch, tips it into her hand. There’s a ring in it, a beautiful gold ring with a square design, carved with Egyptian hieroglyphics.</p><p>“The trader mostly sells them in Egypt,” Quynh says. “But this one means protection, and love.” She looks up, straight into Andromache’s face, reaches out her free hand to tuck a piece of hair behind Andromache’s ear. “I think I’m in love with you. I thought you should know.”</p><p>Andromache kisses her, in answer, and Quynh slips the ring onto her finger, wraps her arms around Andromache’s neck.</p><p>When Lykon comes to join them with dinner, he takes one look at them, tangled up together on the blanket and rolls his eyes.</p><p>“Finally,” he says, long-suffering, and Andromache starts to laugh.</p><p>*</p><p>About a thousand years later, they all start to dream of a pair of young men. One is pale-skinned with a classical nose and a crucifix around his neck. The other is swarthy and bearded with a taqiya on top of his head. They kill each other – over and over and over.</p><p>“Another pair of lovers,” Lykon groans. “What did I do to deserve this?”</p><p>“They hate each other,” Andromache points out, confused.</p><p>“Sometimes people fall in love so fast they mistake it for hatred,” Lykon rolls his eyes, pulls his pack higher up his shoulders. “We should leave them to work it out, I think.”</p><p>They go on with their lives and their battles, and in quiet moments Andromache daydreams of their two new fellows, of meeting them. She talks to Quynh late at night about the places they could all visit, the things they could do with five instead of three. Quynh laughs and kisses her nose.</p><p>“It’ll be nice to have some babies along for the ride,” she says. “Increase Lykon’s grandfatherly tendencies.”</p><p>“I heard that,” Lykon says from across the fire, and Quynh makes an exaggerated ‘oops’ face at Andromache, rolls over to press her face into the hollow of Andromache’s throat. It’s a future, a promise, something new to look forward to than their Sisyphean task of balancing out humanity’s endless capacity for cruelty. It’s a brightness on the horizon, a new beginning.</p><p>But then Lykon dies.</p><p>And then Quynh hits the bottom of the ocean, still screaming.</p><p>And then Andy starts to drink and forgets about family and love and anything other than rage and the swing of her sword.</p><p>(And that is the end of that.)</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>ii. Joe</strong>
</p><p>Yusuf al-Kaysani wakes with a start in the city that will one day become Istanbul. It is not yet dawn, and the moonlight is dreamy and silver through their fine muslin curtains. Nicolò turns with an endearing snuffle, pulling the blankets firmly over his head. Yusuf cannot believe this man ever fought a campaign, cannot believe that Nicolò once roused himself at the crack of dawn every day to don chainmail and lead men into battle. The amount he likes to sleep is unbelievable – but Yusuf is not complaining. He loves to draw Nicolò asleep, has amassed more pictures in that vein over the last century than he’s bothered to count.</p><p>He turns onto his back and regards the ceiling, traces the contours of their last century together as he likes to do when he can’t sleep, winding back the threads from this moment backwards in time like the myth of Penelope and Odysseus Nicolò likes so much.</p><p>“I’d wait for you, weaving,” he’d said once, in the hills above Damascus. It had been two decades since they’d stopped trying to tear each other’s throats out, half a decade since they’d started sleeping together. “It wouldn’t matter how long you made me wait. I’d be faithful. I’d unpick the loom every night to make sure that no-one else could take my heart hostage.”</p><p>“You’d never <em>let </em>your heart be taken hostage,” Yusuf had pointed out, dancing his fingers across the pattern of Nicolò’s ribs. “You’d gut them before they even got close.”</p><p>Nicolò had sworn in Genoese and rolled his eyes, a little impatient. “That’s not what I’m trying to say.”</p><p>“I don’t understand your bizarre heathen metaphors.”</p><p>“Yes you do. You’re deliberately being an ass.”</p><p>Yusuf had raised himself up onto one elbow, the better to look down into Nicolò’s face. “Maybe I want to hear you say it,” he’d said.</p><p>“You’re impossible,” Nicolò’d sighed, but pulled Yusuf down, closer, wrapped his legs around Yusuf’s waist. “I’m trying to say I love you. Happy now?”</p><p>“You are convoluted and ridiculous,” Yusuf had told him, punctuating every word with a kiss. Then, “I know. I love you too.”</p><p>It was fifty years ago and it still brings a giddy smile to Yusuf’s face, the thought of it. He thinks back further, to his first sight of Nicolo, silhouetted against a golden sky, blood-stained and deadly but this one is blurring around the edges, soft-focus. He hadn’t known then who Nicolò was, what Nicolò would become to him – but he’d watched the knight tear down the incline and through men like a portent, like judgement day come at last. He tries to remember the little details he’s sure have been branded into the folds of his brain but they slip out of his grasp and he lies, winded for a second, good mood evaporating. That was stupid, he thinks after a second’s hard study of the hair cracks in the ceiling. Immortality doesn’t have to include a perfect memory. Woe on him for thinking it would.</p><p>He sits up and liberates the top blanket from Nicolò’s tyrannical clutches, wraps it around himself and decamps to the rocking chair by the window with the embroidered cloth notebook he’d picked up in the market last month for drawing. The moon is peering cautiously through the curtain. Yusuf begins to write, as quickly as he can before any other details slip through his fingers. He writes and writes and writes, pouring their story into the safety of the pages where it won’t get so easily lost.</p><p>“What are you doing?” Nicolò says eventually, voice scratchy. He’s scrunched himself upwards in his tangle of blankets, looks deeply offended to find Yusuf both out of bed and awake at this ridiculous hour of the morning.</p><p>“Nothing,” Yusuf says. He’s not quite ready to share this yet, knows that Nicolò won’t mind. They trust each other enough now to respect secrets.</p><p>“Come back to bed,” Nicolò demands sleepily, patting at the blankets. “There’s still a few hours before I make your suhur.”</p><p>Yusuf is happy to oblige, sliding back into the warm bed and wrapping his arms around Nicolò’s naked waist, laughing into his neck at the sound he makes when Yusuf digs cold toes into his calves.</p><p>“You’re going to pay,” Nicolò grumbles against Yusuf’s chest. “I’m going to make you pay.”</p><p>“You do that, love,” Yusuf says, pulling him closer.</p><p>*</p><p>The first few notebooks are all Nicolò: their story past and their story unfolding. All the times they’d killed each other. All the times Nicolò had disappeared, only to come back a few months later infinitesimally different. Pulling him out of a fight in Aleppo. Their softening towards each other, inches at a time. Conversations at sword-point to conversations as they walked through farmland and forests and mountains. Damascus. Constantinople. The Abbasid Caliphate. The Mongol Empire. The way Nicolò’s eyebrows get this tiny, half-moon dent between them whenever he’s thinking hard about something. The calmness that’s settled over him the last few centuries like a blanket of fresh snow, untouchable. His love of myths and legends; the way he tells stories to groups of gathered children or against Yusuf’s heart, late at night. The scars – from before – that are white and smooth against his skin; back, stomach, ankle. The way his kisses always taste different, every time, even after all these years.</p><p>One day, Yusuf is sitting by a camp-fire just off a deep, dark forest road halfway between Sarai and Soltaniyeh. He’s sketching faces to pass the time as they wait for the meal to be ready. Nicolò is at his side, cleaning his daggers; their knees brush. They’re working as messengers and mercenaries for Őz Beg Khan of the Golden Horde, anything that allows them to travel, and Yusuf smiles to himself. Their old comrades-in-arms are happily settled now – wives and children and grandchildren – and no-one has bothered to bring up the fact that neither he nor Nicolò have aged or changed much in the last fifty years. Some genius has started calling them ‘khii üzegdel’ or ‘the ghosts’ and he quite likes the connotations of it. Dead and alive, all at the same time.</p><p>Across the fire an old woman is telling the assembled group of (relative) youngsters her life-story, bundled in blankets against the chill of the night. Her voice is drumbeat-steady and her life seems to have been enormous – moving all over the place, sieges and trade-routes and near misses – and Yusuf pauses his sketching, tilts his head, begins to write bits of it down. She notices him watching, smiles, adjusts her volume so he can hear her words better.</p><p>Much as it pains him to admit it, he thinks later, the world is bigger than the curve of Nicolò’s smile and no-one has a vantage point quite like him. It would be a waste of this God-given opportunity not to. It would be a purpose for all these endless, war-swept years lying ahead of them. Yusuf likes the idea of knowing something about the future, likes the fact that no matter what happens he’ll still be chronicling history from the ground up and making love to Nicolò.</p><p>He starts asking people about their lives – collecting sentences here and there, or full stories when people have time – and Nicolò watches and listens and runs his fingers over the back of Yusuf’s hand in the dark. He doesn’t ask questions. He silently and carefully keeps Yusuf in notebooks and ink. He directs interesting people Yusuf’s way.</p><p>One day, centuries later, they are in Scotland on holiday. Nicolò – Nicky, now – is bundled up in an enormous grey and blue jumper, griping about the cold and the fact that no city should be this cold in <em>May. </em>It’s adorable, coming from a man who once rode across Siberia. Perhaps they’re getting soft in their old age. Perhaps the wonders of the modern world are making them spoiled.</p><p>“Can you smell that?” Nicky says, suddenly, pulling on Yusuf’s – Joe’s – hand. They’ve just been chatting to a homeless man playing the guitar outside of a budget clothing store, and Joe is winding the story around in his head so he won’t forget it before they get to somewhere he can write it down.</p><p>“Smoke,” Joe says, belatedly realising. “Lots of it.”</p><p>They look at each other. Nicky’s brows are drawn down. By silent agreement, they begin to walk in the direction of the smoke, hands swinging between them. They might be able to help. Joe hates burning, but he’d do it to save someone else. Nicky would as well. Such are their lives; such are their consciences. The fire is not hard to find, not far from the city centre. A fire engine screams past them to join several others parked at angles in the street. Police officers are keeping a small crowd back.</p><p>“The library,” someone is saying. “Oh my <em>god.</em>”</p><p>“It just happened,” another person is saying tearfully. “I don’t know how – we were just working like normal then poof, fire.”</p><p>“What is it?” Nicky asks them gently, and they look at him through big, glittery spectacles.</p><p>“The Mackintosh Building,” they tell him. “Art school. Library.” Then, “don’t worry. Everyone got out.”</p><p>“I’m sorry for your loss,” Joe says, because there’s nothing to do and he can’t think of anything else to say and he’s lost enough precious places to know how much it hurts, especially when you weren’t expecting it.</p><p>They stand in silent vigil over the fire with a growing crowd of students and staff members until the fire is nearly out and the police get them to disperse. As they walk back to their rented flat next to the park, climb the stairs, Joe wonders how many books have just been destroyed by a capricious turn of fate. Nicky is talking and talking, doesn’t seem to mind that Joe isn’t listening, disappears into the kitchen as soon as Joe locks the door.</p><p>Joe settles down on the powder-blue sofa in the window, pulls out his phone, Googles the Mackintosh library and starts to scroll through all the news alerts about the fire. It’s too early to tell what the damage will have been and God knows he’s seen enough death and destruction in the last nine hundred years for nothing to be new to him, but still he holds onto the ache of it. He also can’t stop thinking about his own library in the villa near Genova, perfectly arranged in date order, narratives and sketches, his books about Nicky locked away in a bureau to which he wears the key around his neck. What if a fire started there – by design or accident or fate? What if his entire life’s work was destroyed in five minutes, just like that?</p><p>Nicky appears from the kitchenette with two steaming mugs in his hands and wearing the novelty slipper socks Andy got them for Eid last year in a surprising fit of humour. He settles one by Joe’s elbow and then pulls out his laptop – the battered, broken one he adores beyond all sense or reason rather than the sleek encrypted thing they use for work – and kneels down in front of Joe, opens it on his lap.</p><p>“I was going to give you this for our anniversary,” he says. “But I think you perhaps need it more now.”</p><p>“Huh?” Joe pulls himself out of his thoughts. Nicky hums, taps at a few keys and then turns the laptop to face him. It’s showing a Google Drive, with ten folders, labelled by century. Joe clicks on the one reading ‘1700s’ and it opens into decades, and then years, and then his breath gets stuck somewhere around the base of his throat because he knows what this is, he recognises these stories…</p><p>“Nicky,” he breathes, reverent, when he remembers how to speak, “this must have taken you <em>years.</em>”</p><p>“The better part of a decade,” Nicky says, smile soft and just the tiniest bit smug. “And I don’t mind. All that matters is that they’re safe.”</p><p>Joe can’t put any words to how much feeling is swelling inside him right now, warm and heavy and threatening to break at least three ribs. He puts the laptop gently aside and hauls Nicky up and into his lap, cupping his face and kissing him, fiercely, winding a hand through his hair. His jumper is very soft against Joe’s palm and he makes this little noise that Joe loves, kisses back with just as much fervour, pulling at the neckline of Joe’s t-shirt.</p><p>Joe breaks the kiss briefly, rests his forehead against Nicky’s. “You’re the best person on the planet.”</p><p>“No, I’m not,” Nicky tells him. “I just love you. That’s all.”</p><p>*</p><p>They bring Nile to Genova after everything is said and done. Andy had murmured something about loose ends and took off with Copley. Joe doesn’t know where Booker is – is both terribly angry and terribly sad, has broken several glasses and wept in Nicky’s arms and has now decided not to dwell on it. They’ve got Nile to think of, after all, who just seems quiet and withdrawn and listless now that it’s all over.</p><p>She’s all wide-eyed wonder as the plane swoops low over Genova’s port, landing with the sea on one side and the city on the other, and Joe thinks that this was the right decision to bring her somewhere new, to give her a distraction. They collect their bags and hire motorbikes and Nile gets on behind Joe after some argument.</p><p>“I’m sure I’ll be fine,” she insists, pushing her helmet on over her braids.</p><p>“You haven’t seen how the locals drive,” Nicky tells her in a tone of finality. “And no-one is allowed to get hurt for <em>at least </em>another year. Joe’s heart won’t take it.”</p><p>“No, it won’t,” Joe agrees and that’s when Nile caves, huffing about overprotectiveness and ‘didn’t you two know I was a Marine.’</p><p>They take the coast road that winds and dips sharply between dark green forested hills and the flat, azure ocean, passing red and orange and yellow towns nestled in the hillside. Nile is whooping with delight as they descend from the main road onto the headland that leads to Portofino, and the house above the bay. The gates are just the same – black and embossed, and Nicky is ahead of them, pressing his key into the right slot.</p><p>“Whoa,” Nile says as she slides off the back of Joe’s bike in front of the house. It’s bright yellow with high arched windows, set into the cliff, a clover-filled lawn extending to the right of the driveway. The swing-seat they need to fix after their last stay here is propped up against the side of the tree by the wall. “Guys. How…”</p><p>“This is what happens when you’re eleventh century Genoese nobility,” Joe tells her with a laugh. “Go on, down those steps. I want to see your reaction.”</p><p>She gives him a look very reminiscent of Andy and then does as he says; he follows her down the stone steps at the side of the house, onto the stone walkway between the house and their private inlet. A boat bobs under its tarpaulin, and Nicky has already thrown open the double doors at the bottom. Nile looks up at balconies and sunshine walls and Joe <em>loves </em>the look on her face, like she’s walked into a fairytale and doesn’t know how to make sense of it.</p><p>“I’ve never been somewhere so <em>beautiful,</em>” she says, as earnest as Joe has ever seen her. Nicky looks very pleased with himself and his country and the geographic processes he had absolutely no hand in shaping, and Joe laughs. “I’m just, I…”</p><p>“You’re welcome to stay as long as you like,” Nicky tells her. “Feel free to explore or have a rest. Your room is any of the ones on the top floor that take your fancy. We’ll get dinner ready in a few hours.”</p><p>They leave her to it and walk down the hill into Portofino to buy food, hand in hand, enjoying the heat and the summer sunshine. Nicky’s wearing the kind of white shirt that looks made for him, and Joe is enjoying the appreciative glances Nicky is getting from the tourists, enjoying how Portofino barely changes. They stop outside of their favourite greengrocer’s and Nicky spends ages hovering over tomatoes and grapes and peaches, chewing his bottom lip between his teeth.</p><p>“Nile won’t care,” Joe says at one point after about half an hour.</p><p>“<em>Nile </em>has probably only eaten the trash Americans pass off as Italian food,” Nicky retorts haughtily, “we’re going to do this <em>properly.</em>”</p><p>“Ok,” Joe says, and leaves Nicky to it to wander around the town centre. He picks up a couple of bottles of local limoncello – one for them, one to send to Andy – and a silk headscarf he thinks Nile would like the pattern of before meeting Nicky back at the town square to walk home.</p><p>They have dinner on the terrace – fresh pesto and pasta and onion focaccia, parmesan and champagne, fresh fruit – and chat about places they’ve been, places they want to go to. Nile has never been to Europe before, never travelled much beyond what she did with the army but by the end of the meal she’s scribbling down a list on a napkin.</p><p>“I’ll clear up,” Nicky says, and then when Joe goes to protest that he cooked, “you wanted to show Nile the library, love, and it won’t take me long.”</p><p>“The library?” Nile asks, jerked out of her contemplation of the sparkling sunset sea by the sound of her name.</p><p>“Joe’s library. He’s very proud of it. I think you’ll rather like it too.”</p><p>“Ok,” Nile says, and Joe leads her up through the house, opening the door. There’s a faint chirrup and a delicate black cat uncurls itself from the big leather armchair.</p><p>“This is Vega,” Joe says, crouching down to pet the cat behind her ears. She purrs and rasps her tongue against his fingers and then goes to investigate Nile, rubbing her head against Nile’s knees. Nile looks slightly disconcerted for a second. “The same lineage of cats have lived at this place for centuries, longer than we’ve had it. There are more of them in the outhouses, I’m sure, but Vega likes it in here.”</p><p>“Hi Vega,” Nile says, and then turns her attention to the shelves.</p><p>“Have a look if you like,” Joe tells her, and she plucks a book at random from the nineteenth century shelf, flips gently through the pages, and then looks up, confused.</p><p>“This is…” she says.</p><p>“I wrote them.” Joe watches her eyes flicker for a second as she digests this piece of information. Vega meows imperiously from the floor, tail twitching. “You’re looking at a thousand years of history, thereabouts.”</p><p>“You <em>wrote </em>them?” Nile says, and her voice shakes, just a little.</p><p>“Yes.” Joe shrugs. “I didn’t want to forget. It grew from there. You’re welcome to borrow and read them if you like, but you might have to learn Arabic and French and Turkish to understand half of them.”</p><p>Nile’s expression cracks open and for once Joe sees the uncertainty again, the lostness she hides beneath implacable stares and competence. She’s only twenty-six, he thinks, so very, <em>very </em>young. On a whim, he reaches out to take her shoulder.</p><p>“There are lots of things you can do with immortality,” he says, gently, “You don’t have to fight all the time, like Andy does. You can do whatever you want.”</p><p>“I don’t <em>know </em>what I want,” Nile says, voice scratchy. She puts the book down on the shelf, swipes at her eyes.</p><p>“That’s ok,” Joe squeezes her shoulder. “It took me centuries to settle on this.”</p><p>Nile laughs then, weakly, and if it’s more of a sob he pretends not to notice. “Ok.”</p><p>“Ok,” he says. “Take your time, Nile. We’ve got your six, all of us.”</p><p>“Thanks, Joe,” she says, and then steps forward and hugs him, arms tight around his middle. He hugs her back, holding her close, and looks up to see that Nicky has silently appeared in the doorway. After a second, he pads across the room to join the hug too, resting his head on top of Nile’s. When she starts to cry, neither of them mention it.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>iii. Nicky</strong>
</p><p>The poets write about immortality. In poems and songs and stories, immortals are divine, unconquerable, sweeping all before them. They sack cities and fight giants and spur on their champions to greater and greater bloodshed. They themselves never deign to shed a single drop of hallowed blood. They themselves are divine, untouchable, awesome in their power.</p><p>Nicolò decides fairly early on that the poets are full of bullshit.</p><p>*</p><p>Immortality is a brutal, violent, pit-viper of a thing. Immortality means that you don’t die – it doesn’t mean that you don’t get hurt. Immortality is violence; it’s a sword in the guts, a dagger in the back, an arrow to the eye. It hurts, every time he’s coming back from it, hurts worse when it’s Yusuf he’s watching.</p><p><em>Blessed are the peacemakers for they are the children of God, </em>the Lord Jesus Christ says in Nicolò’s head, but peace is for the good and kind. There are far too few people willing to live and let live. Perhaps that was why the Lord Jesus Christ said it. Perhaps he knew what a miracle a true peacemaker was. Anyway. That’s beside the point. The world is the world, and they always end up fighting – injustice after injustice after injustice, because they are immortal and they are strong and even though it hurts they will fucking stand up for those weaker than themselves.</p><p>But sometimes they need a bolt-hole, a breather.</p><p>“This is for us,” Nicolò says in Sarai, the first time, having lost a war against a brutal, uncompromising warlord. He hands Yusuf the key, presses his fingers to Yusuf’s face. “Just because the world isn’t at peace doesn’t mean that we don’t have to be.” Then, “it’s only for a little while.”</p><p>They barely get into the doorway of the house before Yusuf is kicking it shut behind them, kissing Nicolò senseless up against one of the columns in their tiny, plant-filled courtyard. Rain dribbles into the pool in the centre and a statue of a local god looks benevolently down at them.</p><p>And so it starts to happen, more by necessity than design to begin with but becoming more and more intentional as the decades pad by. Nicolò builds homes in the frontiers and backwaters of history, dots them all around the world and loops the keys on a ring he keeps tucked away in his bag. Every house bears different decorations and different parts of their story. Sometimes, during the bad times, he’ll run them through his head like a rosary, tasting each one on his tongue. Sometimes Yusuf will murmur them in his ears, the sweetest poem Nicolò has ever heard.</p><p>They’re five years into a sturdy mud-brick home on the outskirts of the new fortress city of Barara in East Africa when Andromache catches up with them. They’ve both dreamed of her and two others on and off since the beginning, discussed them endlessly – gods? saints? – but the dreams had never been concrete enough to pin down her identity or location. Goddess or saint or whatever she is, one day at the end of the dry season she is standing on their doorstep, dark hair pulled back into a loose braid. Her grey eyes are like ghosts in her face and there is a beautiful double-bladed axe strapped to her back.</p><p>“Hello how can I help?” Nicolò asks in the local language, leaning obstructively in the doorway. Behind him, Yusuf has his hand on his sword.</p><p>She responds in perfect Latin, blunt. “I’m not looking for a fight. You two are fucking difficult to track down, you know that?”</p><p>Nicolò looks at her, at the pits under her eyes and the straightness of her spine, and steps aside to let her in. At least she hasn’t tried to kill one of them to check her accuracy. Perhaps she knows what he and Yusuf are to each other, perhaps she doesn’t dare.</p><p>“We could say the same for you,” he says. “Not that we spent too much time looking.”</p><p>“You’ve been busy,” she says.</p><p>“So have you,” Yusuf moves from the back of the room still wary, coiled. Nicolò wonders if Yusuf can feel the earth shifting beneath his feet too.</p><p>She looks him up and down, detached, considering. “Andromache,” she says after a moment, and Nicolò recognises it for as much of a parley as she is capable of offering.</p><p>“Nicolò,” he offers back. Then, nodding in Yusuf’s direction, “Yusuf.”</p><p>He considers asking about the others but decides not to. He and Yusuf have woken sweating from too many of the same nightmares over the last century for there to be any doubt what has happened. He disappears to draw a bath for their guest, to rustle up something from the food their neighbour’s houseboy brought over.</p><p>Dinner is silent, for the most part. Yusuf has his hand on Nicolò’s knee under the table for reassurance. Eventually, at the end, Andromache looks up and says: “So what are you two doing here?”</p><p>“Waiting for an invasion by the Adal Sultanate, working at the Emperor’s court, interrupting slaving missions from foreign powers,” Yusuf tells her flatly.</p><p>“Good food, friendly people,” Nicolò adds, because those things are just as important as history-making and war.</p><p>She gives them a lizard-like stare, narrow-eyed and considering. Nicolò glances to Yusuf who is staring right back in a slightly more confrontational way. They’d spoken about this when Andromache had been in the bath, about an interruption to their life, their choices.</p><p>“We don’t know what she wants,” Yusuf had argued, pacing their bedroom.</p><p>“She’s lost everything,” Nicolò had countered, hands on hips. “The least we could do is hear her out.”</p><p>“Alright,” she says, eventually, wiping her hands on her napkin. “Could you use a third pair of hands?”</p><p>“Sure,” Nicolò says, feeling Yusuf’s hand tighten on his knee. Then, to Yusuf, “We can turn the shed out back into a house for her, seeing as we never use it.”</p><p>Yusuf doesn’t look happy. Neither does Andromache, but even after only six hours, Nicolò is beginning to get the impression that level displeasure is her default.</p><p>“Alright,” Yusuf says, finally. “I’ll talk to our neighbours tomorrow.”</p><p>*</p><p>Life speeds up with Andromache around. There’s really no other way to describe it. She’s relentless, merciless, a hurricane in the shape of a person, and sometimes Nicolò feels winded just watching her. Sometimes she spends a stretch with them, sometimes she disappears without word or warning on a mission of her own, coming back a month or a year later, tight-lipped and tired.</p><p>It’s not the easiest of arrangements. She and Yusuf bicker endlessly – two strong wills in a small room – and Nicolò finds himself being the mediator, finds himself drawing on his training as a priest more and more. He doesn’t particularly like getting in between his lover and their guest, but someone has to do it; and in any case, he’s learned over the centuries that appearing mild and agreeable, forging connections, only making a stand when he absolutely has to, is both a useful tool in its own right and a counterpoint to Yusuf’s passionate temper.</p><p>“Couldn’t you try to be more understanding?” he asks once, about three years in, sitting in Yusuf’s lap in bed, both of them sweaty and blissed out. It is particularly nice to have the house to themselves, to know that Andromache isn’t sitting and drinking in the next room whilst they make love.</p><p>“If she stops trying to control everything, yes,” Yusuf says, cupping Nicolò’s face in one hand. The calluses on his fingers always send shivers down Nicolò’s spine. “We know more about the political situation at court, about Barara, than she does. She’s only going to mess things up the way she goes on.”</p><p>“Have you told her that or have you just glared?”</p><p>Yusuf hums, brushes his lips against the tip of Nicolò’s nose. “I haven’t, have I?”</p><p>“Not everyone can read you as well as I can, love,” Nicolò says, leaning forward into another kiss.</p><p>To be fair to Yusuf, Andromache doesn’t make things easy either. She is prickly and defensive at the best of times, never gives ground without a fight. Sometimes Nicolò even finds his own patience running thin with her – but that’s usually when she ups and disappears for a while. He wonders whether this is a survival strategy of her own.</p><p>One day, he comes home from court to find the pair of them lingering in the yard of the compound, bloodstained and laughing and leaning on their swords. At his appearance, Andromache gives him a smile – an <em>actual smile</em> – claps Yusuf on the shoulder, and disappears around the back of the house. Yusuf moves towards him, grinning, and Nicolò takes several steps backwards, holds up his hands.</p><p>“No. No way. These are my court clothes; you are not getting blood all over them.” Then, “Do I want to know what happened?”</p><p>“Better not, beloved,” Yusuf says. He’s still grinning. “Andromache’s been killed enough times today without you adding to the tally.”</p><p>Nicolò digests this piece of information, breathes out through his nostrils. He hates both the thought and the reality of Yusuf getting hurt, but realises this was a) probably coming for a while, and b) why they did it when he was out at court.</p><p>“I need a bath,” Yusuf says ruefully, looking down at his shirt, and then up at Nicolò. His smile turns into a smirk. “Want to join me?”</p><p>Nicolò rolls his eyes, laughs. “Do you even need to ask?”</p><p>*</p><p>It gets better after that. They begin to talk, to learn from each other instead of fight – weapons, techniques, languages, habits. Andromache drinks too much but neither of them mention it. They have each other to hold after nightmares of drowning. She doesn’t.</p><p>When the time comes to move on, Nicolò expects an argument. It doesn’t come. Yusuf turns to Andromache, who is lounging on a stool by the door.</p><p>“Where next, boss?” he asks, and Andromache grins.</p><p>*</p><p>Disembarking the ship in Genova is more emotional than he thought it would be. The city itself is very nearly a stranger and it hits him that all this time, all these lives have passed his by. He should have come back sooner, like they did for Yusuf and Damascus. He shouldn’t have let fear and foreboding keep him from these shores.</p><p>The three of them take rooms above a small trattoria, breath in sea-salt and fresh dough, breathe out the terror and tension of the French Revolution. They’ve spent four years smuggling people out from under the nose of the Committee of Public Safety, with trips to smash up slavers on the west coast of Africa.</p><p>One morning, when Yusuf is travelling to investigate the rumours of war coming out of France, Andromache rouses Nicolò with a cup of water to the face and a demand that he take her sightseeing.</p><p>“I thought you were busy with your artist,” he groans, rolling over. They don’t get the luxury of uninterrupted, safe sleep when they’re working, and he intends to wring as much of it out of this break as possible.</p><p>“I was,” Andromache says. “But I haven’t been to this part of Italy before and you’re more important than he is, so…”</p><p>“Charmer,” Nicolò says, pleased, groping around for his shirt. She’s in a good mood, a settled mood – smiles, patience, no hip-flask in sight. They’re few and far between and he doesn’t intend to let this one slip through his fingers.</p><p>She’s found horses and packed lunch already and they guide them south out of the city, up the glowering cliffs, watching the fishermen and the ships and the foaming breakers through the trees, alternating between telling their favourite myths and the wave-swept, bird-filled silence. They keep going down the coast, south and south and south, and if he closes his eyes he could be a child again, running through woods just like these with his siblings and cousins, playing at fighting the infidels or capturing dragons. What would they say if they’d seen what he’s become? He’s not sure he knows; not sure he wants to.</p><p>By the time the sun is sinking towards the sea, they still haven’t turned back. Nicolò hasn’t asked, feels that there’s something unfolding before him that he doesn’t want to put a name to. He knows where they are, how close they are to the site of the villa he grew up in. It won’t be standing any longer and the cliffs will have changed - the sea stops for no man - but still there’s an ache like someone has wrapped sticky fingers around his heart. He loved that villa so much, but always knew he couldn’t inherit – as the bastard son, the Church was the only place he could repent of his father’s sins.</p><p>They come out of the woods onto a road that turns into a driveway, winding up towards the headland. Nicolò looks over at Andromache, but she’s staring straight ahead, expression set and stony. There’s a house appearing now, set into the side of the cliff, all arches and tumbledown walls and waterfalls of ivy, the sea dressed in blue satin metres below. Yusuf is standing in the doorway, even though he should be on a ship back from France right now. He’s holding a key and looking very pleased with himself. Nicolò can feel his heartbeat thudding in his ears, slides off his horse and takes a step forward, looking up. His family’s coat of arms above the door hasn’t changed at all.</p><p>“You…” he starts, then gives up. His throat is tight, his vision blurring.</p><p>“I’ve never seen you speechless before,” Yusuf says and he’s smiling and this is all <em>too much. </em></p><p>“My <em>God,</em>” Nicolò manages.</p><p>“He’s been planning this for years,” Andromache says offhand, coming over from where she’s let the horses loose to graze. “Told me about it in Paris.”</p><p>Nicolò swears again, more because he doesn’t know what else to say, and lurches forward into Yusuf’s arms, burying his face against the scratchy cravat Europeans have taken to wearing with a fervour. After a second, he blindly reaches an arm out and reels Andromache in too; she sighs and lets him, resting an arm across his back. Her long hair tickles his ear.</p><p>“I love you,” he says when he remembers how words work. “I love you both so much. You have no idea how much this means.”</p><p>“I love you too,” Yusuf responds.</p><p>“Yeah,” Andromache says, which is about as close to endearment as she gets and precious for it. She disentangles herself after a few minutes, straightens her dress. “I’m going for a swim. For several hours. Please be done by the time I get back.”</p><p>“Yes boss,” Yusuf says, and Nicolò hears her feet padding away. “Come on,” he says, “it’s a disaster inside, but I can give you the tour.”</p><p>After significant renovation work, the house becomes their safest, loveliest, most permanent home. They come back after trips away – to Freetown, doing what they can against the transatlantic slave trade, to Serbia, helping the uprising against the Ottoman Empire – to find it comfortable and quiet, settling to the shape of their lives. Andromache leaves them there towards the end of 1815, but by summer 1816 she’s back, towing the blonde, bearded man they’d all started dreaming about in Freetown. He worries a wedding ring around his finger and looks like he might be about to stab someone. Andromache has that effect on people. Nicolò tries to make his expression as welcoming as possible to balance it all out.</p><p>“Yusuf, Nicolò,” she says brusquely, pointing at them. “But they go by Joseph and Nicolas more now, especially in Europe. Boys, this is Sebastien. He fought under Napoleon, died in Russia.”</p><p>“So that’s what the snow was about,” Yusuf hums.</p><p>“Welcome,” Nicolò says. “It’s good to meet you at last.”</p><p>Sebastien takes a room on the top floor and keeps to himself for a few months. One morning they wake up and he’s gone. Over breakfast, Andromache shrugs.</p><p>“He’ll work it out, eventually. He’ll be back.”</p><p>Her prediction comes true about thirty years later. They’re back in Genova – well, Nicolò is, Yusuf and Andromache are impersonating a married couple in London, will meet him in New York. Sebastien looks half-dead, looks like he’ll keel over given half the opportunity. Nicolò guides him to a chair on the terrace, finds a blanket and a green glass bottle of absinthe Andromache has left behind. They sit and watch the sun blaze into the ocean for a long while, and when Nicolò turns his head there is a question in Sebastien’s face.</p><p>“You can ask,” he says. “I’ll tell you if I don’t want to answer.”</p><p>Sebastien exhales, and Nicolò thinks he’s not going to but he does, awkwardly, as though the words weren’t cut for his mouth. “You and Joseph are…lovers?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“Right.”</p><p>“Is that a problem for you?” Nicolò asks, mildly.</p><p>“No of course not,” Sebastien says instantly. “I was in the army. And the during the Revolution there was a craze for the classics, the ancients weren’t…” he runs a hand through his hair, changes tack, “I’m not bothered by what people choose to do in their private lives, as long as it isn’t hurting anyone.”</p><p>“But you are bothered by something?”</p><p>There’s a genuine moment when Nicolò thinks that Sebastien is going to give him a truthful answer but it passes, quickly and silently and like it never was there. He just shrugs, which is no answer at all, then asks instead: “You’re going to America, next?”</p><p>“Yes.” Nicolò doesn’t question how he knows this. “Joseph’s choice, this time, but we all agree. Fucking slavery. I hate it.”</p><p>“Me too.”</p><p>Nicolò glances at him. The words are as easy and natural as anything. “Want to come?”</p><p>“Will you have me?” Sebastien asks, bitter, and then before Nicolò can answer, “I forged papers, during the Revolution, during the war. Never got caught, so they must be pretty good. I can offer you that.”</p><p>“That’s useful,” Nicolò nods. “Very useful, actually. But we’d have you even so. You do know that, right?”</p><p>“I do now,” Sebastien says, and finally he’s smiling, just a little. It’s a victory and Nicolò raises his glass to it. After a second, Sebastien does too.</p><p>*</p><p>He knows Joe is back from taking Nile round the coast in the boat by the fact that there are a pair of leather loathers lying abandoned in the hallway, a cap dropped on top. Vega, down by the door to the kitchen, is alternating between washing herself and regarding the shoes with the silent cat eyes of judgement.</p><p>“Me too, piccolina,” he tells her, scratching her briefly behind the ears and then going to find Joe. It’s not that difficult; he’s reading a book in the sitting room with the door open and the new singer from Beirut he’s into at the moment blaring from the speakers. Nicky pastes a scowl on his face and marches straight across the room, sits down heavily on Joe’s lap.</p><p>“Well hello there,” Joe says, lowering the book onto the arm of the chair. “You look irritated.”</p><p>“It has been nearly a thousand years,” Nicky growls, taking Joe’s face between his hands, enjoying the way Joe’s eyes widen, “and you still seem incapable of putting your damn shoes away.”</p><p>“You’re not making a very good case for me to stop, habibi,” Joe replies, leaning his forehead against Nicky’s. His face is an open challenge and his hands find Nicky’s hips, thumbs digging in just a little – unrepentant, ridiculous man that he is. He starts to kiss along Nicky’s jawline.</p><p>“I’ll make bouillabaisse for dinner,” Nicky threatens, trying to hold onto his irritation. It is very difficult.</p><p>“You wouldn’t do that to poor Nile,” Joe says, the words humming against Nicky’s skin, “and anyway, I can think of a better punishment.”</p><p>Nicky gives up then, winds his hands through Joe’s hair and kisses him, hard, with teeth. Joe curses and kisses back, pulls Nicky’s t-shirt up and over his head. It’s always a bit like this after a near-death experience, after being on a mission where privacy is a luxury. It’s always nice to be back home.</p><p>“Oh my <em>god,</em>” someone wails from the doorway some time later, and they freeze. “My <em>eyes</em>!”</p><p>Nicky looks over his shoulder to see Nile standing there, glass of tea in her hand and her headphones around her neck, her face an absolute picture of horror.</p><p>“You are both over nine hundred years old, have you never heard of a <em>door</em>?” she demands, and Nicky thinks that they probably deserved that one.</p><p>“Sorry,” Joe rumbles, not sounding sorry in the slightest. It’s too much; Nicky collapses into laughter against his shoulder, feels Joe’s hand come up to cradle the back of his head.</p><p>“Sorry, Nile,” he wheezes, a little more sincerely, but he’s not entirely sure whether she hears him.</p><p>“I’m going to the kitchen,” she says, still sounding horrified, “Please take your sex life upstairs or get dressed or something…argh. Christ.”</p><p>Nicky hears her footsteps fleeing down the corridor, Vega’s irritated meow. Joe whispers in his ear: “What’s a home without a kid to scar for life?” and Nicky starts to laugh again.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>iv. Nile</strong>
</p><p>A thing about Nile that no-one but family knows is that she was fifteen when her cousin went missing. It was a finger-snap – one day she was there with her perfect weave and her glittering smile, and the next she was gone. At least with her Dad she got closure, a funeral, a graveside to visit. With Michelle there was nothing but uncaring police and a case closed too quickly.</p><p>So when she starts having dreams about drowning more and more and more, sees Andy developing grey hairs and scars that don’t fade, she starts to think – about immortality, about her purpose, about what she could do.</p><p>“I’m gonna spend some time on my own,” she tells Nicky one evening, about ten years later. They’ve spent the last decade running pell-mell over the globe, destroying chemical weapons stores, taking on unlawful detentions of immigrants and minorities in the USA and China, rescuing hostages the international community has given up on. It’s all good, vital work; it all leaves her feeling fierce and proud and half-wishing her parents could see her, could see the way the world shifts towards a better future because of their actions. But it’s not a purpose. It’s Andy’s purpose. And Andy doesn’t have much time left, not in the grand scheme of things. And there are questions that need answering and one thing Nile hates is an unanswered question, a what-if trailing spindly legs and whirring wings like a very existential harvestman-fly. Nicky gives her a patient look over the top of his wine glass and she shrugs. “Just need to figure some things out.”</p><p>“Ok,” he says, leaning forward to press a kiss to her forehead, just the way her brother used to. “Take whatever you need. Call us if you need us.”</p><p>*</p><p>She knows that Quynh was dropped somewhere in the North Sea, and spends a few months in London at various university archives, posing as a researcher to try and narrow down the area. London in 2030 cannot decide whether it wants to be a hellhole or a paradise; local green initiatives and communities are everywhere, but still the exhaust fumes are choking and the city is sweltering. Nile is quite happy to leave when she’s got what she needs, taking the train to the port city of Southampton and making a list in a new notebook she’s bought for the case of all the skills she’s going to need. Being a Marine has prepared her for a lot of their work; she can clear rooms, shoot well, knows tactics and strategies, can parachute jump and drive a car, has more resilience than a cockroach or a garbage truck but none of these are particularly useful when it comes to finding a woman five hundred years lost under the sea.</p><p>It takes time. Isle of Wight to learn boats, Cornwall and North France for the particular type of fishing trawler she thinks she’s going to need to use. She learns to dive in Australia and then practises around the Blue Hole in the Red Sea with a very good instructor, diving over and over again until she thinks she’ll be able to do it on her own. She goes to university to learn how to analyse and map data, joins the coastguard for a stint, spends some time in lifeboats. Joe, Nicky and Andy send her postcards and photographs and care packages from wherever they are in the world, and usually they all manage to make it back to the house in Genova for Christmas and Eid each year.</p><p>They aren’t a replacement for the mother-and-brother shaped wound in her life – they’re too different for that – but they’re quickly becoming family, the people she texts random thoughts to late at night, the people she calls when she’s had a bad day. Sometimes, when the missing gets really bad, Nicky will put her on speakerphone if it’s safe to do so and she sits and listens to him cooking dinner and singing badly to whatever’s on the radio, hears Joe and Andy bickering in the background. Sometimes, when it’s worse than bad, she looks at the phone she’s not thrown away and the numbers she’s not deleted and she thinks of Booker, somewhere alone in the world too. She writes to him on days like that, pours out her feelings and her heart onto paper and tucks them into a tin she keeps in her go-bag.</p><p>Her mother dies the year she moves to Whitby to begin her search in earnest. She spends the first week in her new harbourside apartment – in view of the dented little fishing trawler she’d bought for a song – curled up in her brother’s Cubs sweater and cries. It’s better this way, she tells herself. It has to be.</p><p>The next morning, she meets her downstairs neighbour, an EMT called Elspeth Soyinka who has the neatest cornrows Nile has ever seen and always wears them pulled into a glittery scrunchy.</p><p>“It makes people smile,” she says over jollof and wine in her pretty apartment. Then, scrunching her nose, “Why did an American as cool as you move to this grubby little backwater?”</p><p>“I’m a private investigator,” Nile says, and it’s not even that far from the truth, really. “I follow my cases.” Then, “why did you stay, if you think it’s such a backwater?”</p><p>“It’s my home,” Elspeth says. “Where else would I go?”</p><p>It becomes a thing to wind up on Elspeth’s couch after a long day on the sea, when she’s just back from hospital. They make out a few times, drunken, giggling, and it’s a lovely thing but Nile makes it very clear that it’s nothing serious. That she’ll be moving on.</p><p>“I’ll have you whilst I’ve got you,” Elspeth says into Nile’s shoulder one evening. “I don’t mind.”</p><p>Soon enough it’s June and she’s about fifteen miles off Robin Hood’s Bay when the iron maiden shows up on her sonar. She stares at it for a second, but it’s definitely the right shape and there are no shipwrecks in this little patch of sea. Hope begins to boil under her ribs and she lets out a slow breath, anchors, and goes to change into her diving gear, checking everything twice over and attaching the winch rope to her belt. The dive is quick and freezing – the iron maiden is only about ninety metres below the surface, shallower than all Nile’s experience in the Red Sea – and she’s back on the boat before she knows it, taking a few minutes to breathe through the decompression sickness and let her body return to equilibrium. Then she winches Quynh out of the water.</p><p>It lies, silent and menacing on the deck of her boat. Above her, a couple of herring gulls scream warnings and divebomb the waves. There’s no sound, none at all, and Nile wonders if Quynh has run out of life like Andy has, if all of this was for nothing. And then – a deep, rattling, unbelievable breath. Nile takes her wrench and makes sure her gun is close at hand. Who knows what five hundred years of drowning do to a person?</p><p>She needn’t have worried, not really. Quynh is half-conscious, eyes slitting open and shut again in rapid succession and her limbs flop like a new-born baby’s. Nile lifts her carefully out of the horrible device and deposits her in a pile of blankets, wrapping her close and tight before shoving the fucking thing over the side and back into its watery grave. Then she walks back and lifts a retching Quynh up, blankets and all, and brings her into the warmth of the cabin, brings her back to dry land.</p><p>*</p><p>The thing is that she’s been so hyper focused on finding Quynh that she doesn’t really know what to do next. She calls Elspeth from the harbour, and finds her waiting at the front door to their building as she carries Quynh in. Elspeth’s eyes are wide, her mouth open.</p><p>“What the fuck, Nile?” she says, following Nile up the stairs. “This was…”</p><p>“Sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t…” Nile pauses, breathes, lies, “she’d been abandoned by her employers at sea. Modern slavery. They must have confiscated her passport, if she’d ever had one to begin with. I wasn’t actually expecting to find her after all this time.”</p><p>Quynh’s begun crooning to herself in a language Nile doesn’t recognise. Elspeth snaps into work mode, ordering Nile into the kitchen to make tea and bring towels. They get Quynh dried off and to drink something hot, and then try to get her into bed but she latches onto Nile’s sweatshirt and won’t let go. A compromise is found – the sofa, with soup and tea and hot water bottles and season fifty-something of the Great British Bake-off, which Elspeth has got Nile hooked on. Elspeth kisses Nile on the nose, says, “get me if you need anything,” and then leaves, shutting the door carefully behind her.</p><p>Quynh is still and silent for a long time, then says something in the same language she’d been singing in, something Nile doesn’t understand.</p><p>“Sorry,” Nile says, and Quynh tries again.</p><p>“No, I can’t…” Nile pauses, and then tries French, Italian, even the little Genoese Nicky has been trying to teach her recently. Quynh gets the idea too, but Nile understands none of the other languages she speaks either, until eventually she says something in Arabic and Nile laughs, shortly, more out of relief than anything else.</p><p>“Who are you?” Quynh is saying. “Who <em>are </em>you?”</p><p>“Nile,” Nile says. “My name’s Nile. I’m like you.”</p><p>“Undying?”</p><p>Nile nods and Quynh begins to shudder, to shake. Nile wraps an arm around her shoulders and holds her whilst the TV witters on about soggy bottoms and royal frosting.</p><p>*</p><p>The dreams of drowning stop, abruptly. Nile wonders if the others have noticed, wonders if they got them as much as she did after so long. They don’t mention anything so she decides to stay in Whitby for a while, to let Quynh adjust to everything. It’s very, very needed - Quynh oscillates wildly between relative steadiness and being huddled in a corner for hours on end, between holding a conversation and holding a knife. After the kitchen knives all go missing, Nile caves and buys Quynh a set of ceramic knives with sheaths she can wear strapped to her body. This calms her down a little. The kitchen knives re-appear in random places, like gifts from a cat.</p><p>Nile sells her sturdy little boat and starts work on a database of other missing persons cases. She helps Quynh with modern English and the modern world. She talks her through nightmares, and helps Elspeth around the house, and slowly she stops thinking about the family who think she’s dead. Slowly, they become a rueful remembrance. Slowly, her letters to Booker become memory-stashes rather than emotional melt-downs. Slowly, she learns how to keep going.</p><p>“Who this?” Quynh asks one evening. She’s just discovered photographs and is now thoroughly investigating the ones stuck to Nile’s fridge – the ones Nile has printed off of her family before and her family afterwards. Elspeth is behind Quynh, plaiting Quynh’s hair for her and Nile is cooking pasta. The radio burbles with quiet, classical music.</p><p>“Who is this,” Nile corrects automatically.</p><p>“Those are Nile’s terrifying godparents, Andy and Joe” Elspeth says. When Quynh doesn’t respond, she continues, “the white guy is Joe’s husband, Nicky.”</p><p>“Andy,” Quynh murmurs, then is quiet and thoughtful for the rest of the evening.</p><p>Later, Quynh slips into Nile’s bed like she usually does. She’s wearing Nile’s brother’s Cubs sweater, which she has become very possessive over. Not that Nile minds, really. Azon’d always had the kindest heart, a penchant for picking up strays; he’d have given Quynh his jumper without a second thought.</p><p>“Andy,” she says. “Andromache. She’s cut her hair.”</p><p>Nile braces herself for anger but it doesn’t come. Quynh just sounds epically, achingly sad. “Why didn’t she come back for me?”</p><p>“She tried,” Nile says, voice rough, reaches up to touch Quynh’s face. Quynh lets her. “She broke her heart trying. She looked for you for hundreds of years, but even immortal people are still people. Even immortal people can’t try forever.”</p><p>“But you found me.”</p><p>“Yeah.” Nile hums. “I’m younger. I didn’t know you, before. And anyway, it would have been impossible without modern technology - even then I trained for decades to learn everything I needed.”</p><p>Quynh chews this over. Her plaits are very neat, like black ink stains against the lamplight pooling on Nile’s pillows. “Why? Why did you do it?”</p><p>“Because I could and because it was the right thing to do,” Nile says, and then, because she doesn’t have any right to keep it from Quynh any longer, “and Andy’s dying. Her wounds have stopped healing. I…closure. I wanted to give her closure, after everything she’s done for me.”</p><p>“Lykon,” Quynh mumbles, face stone and unreadable.</p><p>“Yeah,” Nile says. “Yeah.”</p><p>Quynh retreats into herself for weeks, tidelike, eerie. She threatens Nile at knifepoint several times and stabs her once, but Nile just lets her get on with it. One day, they’re in Tesco buying food when Quynh abruptly whirls around, jumpers and scarfs flapping, brandishing a massive pack of chocolate fingers like a weapon.</p><p>“I want to see her,” she says.</p><p>Nile blinks. “Ok. I usually go back for Christmas, so…ok. I’ll book tickets.”</p><p>*</p><p>She says goodbye to Elspeth and drives Quynh to Birmingham airport, manages to get her – ceramic knives and million scarves and all – through security and onto the plane without too much of a faff. Quynh is in equal parts delighted by and freaked out by the three-hour flight to Genova, alternating between asking lots of questions and staring out of the window, fists clenched around the seat-arms. When they arrive, Nile hires a car and drives them both to Portofino, up to the house. Opens the door. Pulls a suddenly listless Quynh from the passenger side.</p><p>“The kid’s home!” she hears Joe bellow from somewhere inside the house, and the front door bangs open. Vega shoots out, followed by Joe who suddenly stops, stares, a deer in headlights.</p><p>“Nile?” he manages, before Andy is appearing behind them, sleek as usual with the stupid socks she’s so fond of firmly on her feet. Her hair is greyer than it was before and there’s a new scar on her cheek, just under her eye and she spots Quynh instantly. Quynh stops trying to hide behind Nile. Andy opens her mouth but no words come out. The air is like a thunderstorm, and Nile braces herself for all hell to break loose.</p><p>Quynh rasps something in an old, forgotten language and Andy responds in the same. Another deadly, silent, poisonous moment. Nile’s breath feels sour. She was so convinced that she was doing the right thing, but now, faced with Andy, faced with centuries of guilt and grievance and loss, she’s not so sure. Quynh marches forward suddenly, and Nile nearly grabs her, sure she’s forgotten about Andy’s mortality, sure she’s going to put one of her knives through Andy’s eye, but Joe catches Nile’s wrist and Quynh reaches up and drags Andy down into a kiss.</p><p>Nile blinks, hard.</p><p>“Come on,” Joe says, quietly. “Let’s give them a minute.”</p><p>*</p><p>“Sort out some stuff, eh?” Nicky says, joining her on the terrace. Inside, she hear Andy laugh, joyful and found, and something inside her releases, relaxes.</p><p>“Everyone’s got to have a purpose,” she replies. “You can thank Joe for telling me that.”</p><p>“You found yours fast.”</p><p>She shrugs, turns to lean against the rail so she can look him in the face. She’s always liked to do personal revelations looking at people. It’s important to see their expressions before they have a chance to hide them. “My cousin disappeared. We think it was sex traffickers. The police didn’t give a shit because she was Black and poor and from the wrong side of Chicago. There are so many stories like that that don’t <em>have </em>to be like that, you know? And I thought that if I could find Quynh, I could find anyone. So I found her.” She sighs, heavily. “I’m not a warrior in the same way as Andy, or a poet or an artist or a writer. I can’t carve peace out like you do. But I can do this. I can affect things on an individual scale as well as a grand scale. War isn’t just fought on battlefields. I didn’t see it before but I do now.”</p><p>Nicky’s face is soft in the moonlight, and he wraps an arm around her. “I think you’re going to do a lot of good, Nile Freeman. I think you’re going to bring a lot of people the justice they deserve.”</p><p>“Thanks,” she says, leaning her head against his shoulder. “I hope so.”</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>v. Booker</strong>
</p><p>Once, the others dragged him to a concert. It was 1975. Nicky was sporting a ridiculous mullet he’d cut as a dare. They’d just got back from a mission in Angola, were debriefing their employers in London, and afterwards they’d been walking through the chilly, rain-swept streets admiring the Christmas lights when Joe had suddenly brought out four concert tickets from inside his jacket pocket.</p><p>“Fancy it?” he’d asked, handing them over to Andy. “They’re supposed to be very good.”</p><p>She’d pursed her lips for a second and then shrugged. “Why not?”</p><p>“Book? You in?”</p><p>Joe and Nicky’d known them too well, known that an ambush is the only way to get them to do anything. Booker’d shaken his head. “I’m good without losing my hearing for the next week, thanks.”</p><p>“Come on, live a little,” Joe had wheedled. “It’ll be fun.”</p><p>“We all need something good after that shitshow,” Nicky had added.</p><p>Andy had just watched, eyebrows drawn together and he’d sighed, glanced up at a particularly golden angel suspended above their heads. It hadn’t been his idea of fun, but at least Andy’d been here, at least it wouldn’t have just been him and the two lovebirds. He loves them so much, would and has stepped in front of a bullet for both of them, but sometimes the whole passionately-in-love thing gets brutal for someone who is on their own.</p><p>“Fine,” he’d sighed, and Joe had whooped, punched the air, and Booker’d felt an unwilling smile sliding between his teeth.</p><p>They’d gone to get food and drinks before at a shabby little pub in Hammersmith, then joined the queue for the Odeon tipsy and buzzing. The concert itself had been…well. He’d avoided modern music since the 1950s, not liked how loud it was, but this was unbelievable. The band members had all been in slinky white jumpsuits, the lead singer had a ridiculous falsetto and a penchant for calling the audience ‘his darlings,’ and about midway through the set they’d played this song that sent honest-to-god chills racing down Booker’s spine, that seemed to understand <em>exactly </em>what it felt like to be immortal.</p><p>Then Joe and Nicky had started dancing, and Andy had bullied him into joining her and he’d forgotten about the tally of his dead he’d kept in a notebook in his pack, his ghosts subliming into nothingness under the force of wild guitar riffs, neon lights, and vodka.</p><p>“What was that one,” he’d asked the girl at the bar, slurring and slightly too loud, “about the devil? You know that amazing song?”</p><p>“Mate, have you been living under a rock for the last three months?” she’d said, amused. “That’s Bohemian Rhapsody.”</p><p>He doesn’t know why he can’t stop thinking about it now as he stands on the strandline of the Thames. Maybe it’s because, for the first time in nearly two hundred years, he is completely on his own.</p><p>*</p><p>He wanders for a decade or two, hiring himself out as a solo mercenary – Libya, Colombia, Spain, Vietnam – spiralling deeper and deeper with each new country, each new kill order. It doesn’t matter that the people he kills are the cockroaches of humanity, it doesn’t matter that the world rejoices in their passing. All that matters is that he’s so deep in the muck he thinks he might be drowning. His family hates him, he hates himself and he has no idea what to do to make things right.</p><p>He’s got seventy-five years to go and he doesn’t think he’s going to make it. He’s got seventy-five years to go and he can’t show up at their doorstep the same man who left it.</p><p>Eventually he washes up in London, in a grimy little flat above a shop on the Kentish Town Road. He sits on the bare bed and looks at his bag of weapons and his computer and the horrible khaki sleeping bag he’s been using for years now, runs a hand over his shaved head and can’t decide whether to laugh or cry. He’s always thought of London as purgatory; he hates it here with a passion. Fitting, really.</p><p>Winter in London is washed-out, watercolour thing and he goes for long walks getting soaked to the bone, barely eating, drifting through the streets. People give him a wide berth, scared sideways glances. Only the seagulls and pigeons don’t seem to mind him. Andy is dying. His wife and sons are dead. He fucked up. Joe and Nile and Nicky hate him. He has no life other than guns and vodka and motel rooms and departure lounges; he can’t even do the world a favour and end it all. What a fucking joke.</p><p>One day, he’s in Covent Garden when he walks past a church. The door is tilted open. His feet carry him inside without much permission from his brain. It’s truly beautiful – Catholic, he thinks, by the gold at the altar and the stunning, star-painted ceiling. Opposite the font, a woman is leaving the confessional box.</p><p>“Father Michael usually has time for one more, don’t worry,” she says to him as she passes. He’s about to correct her, about to turn on his heel and leave, but…he doesn’t. He walks over to the confessional, lets himself in and sits down. The box is a little small for his knees. He doesn’t know why he’s doing this, why, after over two hundred years of atheism, he’s ended up back in a church. Maybe it’s divine intervention, deus ex machina. Maybe it’s stupidity. He doesn’t think he cares at this point; all he knows is that <em>something </em>has got to give.</p><p>“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he says into the silence. The shadowy figure on the other side of the divider is still. “It has been, fuck, two hundred and sixty years since my last confession. I think.”</p><p>The priest, Father Michael, inhales sharply but doesn’t say anything apart from, “and what are your sins?”</p><p>“Is this…” he pauses, suddenly uncertain. All sorts of political intrigue happened in confession boxes before the Revolution, at least according to the gossip rags. “Is this private?”</p><p>“It’s between you and me and God, son,” Father Michael says. “Confession is sacred.”</p><p>“Right.” Booker breathes in and out, several times, and then forces the words out, one after the other. “I betrayed my friends. I thought I was doing the right thing, that I was helping them, helping her find an end to her misery but I was so wrong and…well. I don’t get to see them for another seventy-five years or so. I’m exiled. I don’t blame them, but it’s just seventy-five years, Andy…she’ll be dead by then and it’s my fault.” He knows this isn’t how confession is supposed to go but he can’t stop, not for anything short of a bullet to the head. Not anymore. “I lost so many other people too. My wife, my sons. All my men. They died hating me because I lived and they didn’t. I can’t die. Physically. I physically cannot die. I know it sounds unbelievable but it’s true. I just heal. Bullets pop right out, wounds sew themselves up. There are a few of us out there, it’s…and I loved them all, so much, but I didn’t see it at the time and they were so <em>angry…</em>”</p><p>“God works in mysterious ways,” Father Michael says, when Booker cannot continue. Then, gently, “it sounds like you’ve been sitting on your grief for far too long.”</p><p>“Yeah,” Booker chokes, just a little. “I’ve figured. I kept telling myself that they were at peace and…”</p><p>“…just because those you love are with God doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt for you. Grieving is important, son. It turns the our lost loved ones into a treasured memory rather than a wound.”</p><p>“Ok.”</p><p>“Ok.” Then, “is there anything else you want to confess?”</p><p>“Murder. I’m a soldier. I’ve killed a lot of people. Mostly bad people.”</p><p>“That is for God to judge,” Father Michael says mildly, and Booker thinks of Nicky and his preternatural calm, aches with the fact he’s got so long before he sees them again.</p><p>“I know. But still. We did what we thought was right. I’m sorry for killing them but I’m not sorry they’re not around hurting other people.” Laughs, “and jealousy, I guess too. Two of my friends are lovers and they’re…it’s difficult. I want what they have and I don’t have it. I can’t have it. Not in the same way. I’m sorry for that. They don’t deserve my jealousy when all they want is for me to be happy.” He swipes at his eyes. “What’s my penance, Father?”</p><p>“Betrayal, murder, jealousy,” Father Michael murmurs. “And a lot of grief. You want to do good in the world?”</p><p>“Yes,” Booker says. “Very much.”</p><p>“Find a way to do it through peace. There are plenty of places that need a helping hand, plenty of causes where love is a stronger weapon than a gun.” Father Michael is quiet for a moment, like the quiet before a hammer swings. “That is your penance. Do you know your act of contrition?”</p><p>“Only in French.”</p><p>“That will do.”</p><p>Booker says the prayer, receives the absolution in return and thanks the priest, peeling himself out the confessional box and heading for the door, back out into the rain. He buys a coffee from a little store and walks to a deserted, drenched Soho Square, settling down onto one of the benches and putting his head into his hands.</p><p>He doesn’t know how long he cries for, but when he gets up to leave he feels just a little lighter.</p><p>*</p><p>He stays in London for the next thirty years or so, volunteering at a homeless shelter and working for a soldiers’ charity. He makes friends with his fellow volunteers and co-workers, goes out for drinks like a regular person, goes on walks, takes photographs, fills his small flat with crap. He still trains and fights, keeps his fitness and his skills sharp just in case but a cup of tea and a listening ear is more his arsenal now than a machine gun and a forger’s pen. He learns sign-language from a class and from his friend Belle, who also works at the shelter. They draw him into their ridiculous, huge friendship group full of brightly-coloured, wacky people and he ends up over at Belle’s a night a week, eating pizza and having spiralling conversations with them and their friends about spirituality and cosmology and colonialism, only just manages to avoid talking about being on the ground in Kenya fighting the English in the 1950s like he was there. Which they were. All these bits of history that bear their fingerprints. It’s a marvel to look at when he takes a step back.</p><p>It takes longer, but he starts to dig up the grave in his heart where he’d buried his dead all those years ago. They come back to him in increments, in images – one by one by one. Angelique looking beautiful on their wedding day, coming down the aisle towards him on her father’s arm. His sons playfighting with sticks, their screaming laughter like nothing could be funnier than rolling around in a puddle and making a mess of themselves. Surviving the turmoil of the Revolution, signing up for war. Kissing Angelique for the last time. The incandescent feeling when a letter arrived, mud-stained and months out of date.</p><p>And then, after: meeting Andy in the street, her knife sliding into his stomach. Waking up to her grin, being dragged off again. The summer in Genova, in Nicky and Joe’s beautiful house by the sea. Going home to his family, scared and protective, just to find that they didn’t need him anymore, that they’d outgrown him. Being an old nuisance to his sons instead of a beloved father. Watching Angelique age and die. Building his walls, brick by brick. Becoming Booker instead of Sebastien – sarcastic, stubborn, useful. Andy’s drinking partner, Joe’s chess rival, Nicky’s footrest.</p><p>“You know,” Belle says once, lying on their stomach and regarding him. They’re very high, their pupils dilated. “I swear, you never age. Funny that.”</p><p>“Good genetics,” Booker tells them, feeling a slight flutter of panic. Maybe it’s time to move on.</p><p>“Immortality,” they giggle and roll over onto their back, regard the glow-in-the-dark stars on their ceiling. “That would be cool, right?” Then, conspiratorial, “Don’t worry, I’ll keep your secret.”</p><p>*</p><p>He’s working in a refugee camp in Greece when he gets the note from Nile telling him that Andy has died. He sits down heavily on the steps to the office, winded, buries his head in his hands.</p><p>“Hey, you ok?” someone says, and he looks up to see Ahmad, one of the teenagers he plays football with coming out of the MSF clinic.</p><p>“Yeah, pal.”</p><p>Ahmad gives him a deeply sceptical look. “You don’t <em>look </em>ok.”</p><p>“I just lost someone,” Booker says, tightly. The tears are a storm, building in his throat. “A dear friend. Just got the news.”</p><p>“Oh,” Ahmad says, backing away with awkwardness teenagers have had since time immemorial. “I’m sorry, man.”</p><p>“Thanks,” Booker manages, and then he starts to cry.</p><p>*</p><p>He waits on the strandline of the Thames, kicking a stone back and forth. His stomach is a constrictor knot of tangled, complicated emotions; despite the fact it’s May, the wind still stings with cold. London is nicer than it used to be. Less litter, fewer cars. Climate change has been adapted to with panic and then with tired acceptance of an unavoidable fate, and still the city plods on. He’d been to visit Belle in their nursing home and they’d laughed themselves silly at the sight of him.</p><p>“Good genetics,” they’d wheezed, bent double, and Booker had had to laugh too.</p><p>He hears footsteps crunching towards him and he turns, hands clammy. It’s Nile. It is definitely, <em>definitely </em>Nile. Her hair is shorter, in locs now rather than braids, and the ends are dyed ice blue. She’s wearing a heavy jacket and a bright scarf and after a second of staring at each other she’s walking again steady, colliding with him, wrapping her arms around his waist.</p><p>“Hi,” she says into his coat. “It’s very, <em>very </em>good to see you.”</p><p>“Yeah,” he says, voice thick. “You too.”</p><p>Over her head, he can see Joe and Nicky now, trailed by an East Asian woman in a Cubs sweatshirt. A gold ring glints on her finger. Joe’s clean-shaven and Nicky is wearing the kind of novelty jumper that can only be an inside joke. Both of these things are missed steps, stories, things he wasn’t there to see and laugh about. He meets their eyes, and then silently they’re walking over too, joining the hug. He blinks back the prickle of tears. The East Asian woman takes a photograph on her phone.</p><p>“Come on, Quynh, don’t be shy,” Nicky says, slightly muffled, and she rolls her eyes but joins them.</p><p>“We’ve got a lot to talk about,” Booker says after a second. He’s got to bring them all back down to earth. It can’t be as easy as this, surely?</p><p>“Yeah, I know,” Joe says. “We will.”</p><p>“But not now,” Nicky adds. “Let us enjoy having you home, asshole.”</p><p>*</p><p>They’ve waited for him to bury Andy’s ashes. The very fact of that nearly sets Booker off again but he manages to keep it together until the funeral itself; by that time, they’re all emotional messes so it doesn’t matter.</p><p>Quynh has carved a little headstone for her to put in the garden at Portofino, and they go back inside to big bowls of pasta and alcoholic hot chocolate and a night of remembrances, curled up in a big pile around each other. Booker thinks that this is how he should have done grief this whole time, that storytelling and laughter are a better way to honour a person than silence and pain.</p><p>*</p><p>The car is warm and cosy and old enough to still have a radio. They are driving too fast down a deserted road in the middle of the tundra, Quynh at the wheel and Joe sitting next to her, stabbing at buttons on the front of it. After a second, a very familiar voice begins to wail out of the speaker.</p><p>“Bohemian Rhapsody!” Nicky exclaims, delighted. “Book, remember that concert?”</p><p>“Wait, hold up,” Nile interrupts. “You saw Queen live and you never told me!?”</p><p>“Yep,” Joe twists over to grin at them. “That one time we made Booker unclench.”</p><p>“Shut up, asshole,” Booker tells him, and Joe laughs, loud. “I can’t believe this song is nearly three hundred years old.”</p><p>“This song is like us,” Quynh puts in, swerving to avoid a deer with a death wish. “It never gets old.”</p><p>“No,” Booker says, as the piano starts. <em>I see a little silhouetto of a man…</em>. “I don’t think it does.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I decided to make Andy Andromache of Troy because I love the Iliad and wanted to write it this way, though I know it’s not canon from the comics. Khii üzegdel – is modern Mongolian, I couldn’t be bothered to go hunting for Mongol-Empire Mongolian.<br/>If any of my history or language is wrong, please feel free to drop me a line and I'll change it. I have more inspirations for this story than I can realistically list here, but the 1975 concert at the Hammersmith by Queen is on Youtube and it is brilliant. Freddie Mercury is wonderful. </p><p>Come and chat to me on Tumblr! I hang out @if-fortunate :D</p></blockquote></div></div>
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